
You can clean up a CSV file of all your old financial data so it is imported easily into your invoicing app without having a heap of data re-entry to do.Īs big data and opendata continue to become more commonplace, you can quickly increase the value of your business service offerings and reduce your workload by knowing how to move data around. Maybe your business has grown big enough that you want to start using an invoicing and accounting app rather than a spreadsheet. Or you may be able to develop a business service where you help a client keep their contact data in sync between their email, marketing campaigns and customer relationship management (CRM) software. If you run a micro business that provides social media services, you may be expected to show your client a week’s worth of tweets in advance, and then be able to schedule these to be tweeted at regular intervals throughout the week. You can add simple infographics to your content by cleaning up a CSV file of your research statistics and then import this into a diagram or infographic tool.Īs big data and opendata continue to become more commonplace, you can quickly increase the value of your business service offerings and reduce your workload by knowing how to move data around. As a freelance content producer, you will be expected to produce compelling visuals to go with your articles. For example, a freelancer working on writing SEO content for a client may be expected to show a list of which long-tail keywords are being used in each blog article scheduled for production, and to have these keywords added to a spreadsheet or content calendar. Increasingly, clients are expecting you to be able to manage data when you work with them.

breaks it down into its units of data), so that you can then feed the data back into another app.įor example, here’s the data from Google’s Keyword tool for the keyword “CSV file”:Īnd here’s a sample of how it looks in a CSV format: Why Clean Up Your Data? It takes all your data and parses it (i.e. This sort of file takes all your data and puts the headers of each column in the first row, then lists all your data in subsequent rows, with all non-numerical data enclosed in inverted commas (“like this”), followed by a comma.Ī CSV file can be read in many types of apps and software programs. data that you want to clean up (see below for more examples)Ī CSV file is a “Comma Separated Value” file.To complete this tutorial, you will need: The good news is that being able to manage data and move it between apps is a marketable skill in itself and with a few tricks up your sleeve, you can also save a lot of time: time that you could be spending on more profitable work.

Whether it be from transferring keywords into a spreadsheet, scheduling tweets, syncing data between business apps, managing contact lists, or importing data into an infographic, you will need to know how to clean data from a spreadsheet and organize it into a format that any online app or software can read. While big data gets hyped at an enterprise level, the reality for freelancers and micro businesses owners is that you will need to get your hands dirty playing with data at some stage of your client work.


Regardless of the size of your business, there are growing expectations that you will be data proficient.
